


the blood of you bleeding as you try to let go

by neutrophilic



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Ghosts, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Time Travel, meaningful swimming pools
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neutrophilic/pseuds/neutrophilic
Summary: Throughout her childhood, Harrow sees one specific ghost. Gideon is as helpful as she ever is.
Comments: 29
Kudos: 114
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	the blood of you bleeding as you try to let go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [attheborder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/gifts).



> Title is from 'Not' from Big Thief.
> 
> Thanks to my recipient for having such great taste in fandoms and such excellent prompts.

The second time Harrow saw the ghost, she didn’t know it was a ghost. She also didn’t know that she’d seen this particular ghost before, given that she’d been all of five and a half months old at the time at their first meeting. Harrow had bigger problems than the unrestful dead to worry about. Namely, she was lost without hope in the dark underbelly of Drearburh, and her parents were going to be so mad at her if she was late for dinner.

Every new hallway she had found on her quest for a way out was more neglected than the one before. All of them were festooned with increasingly filthy femurs. The dirt had come in handy, as Harrow had had the idea to track her progress by doodling signs in the grime. Her parents would be furious if she messed with bones that didn’t properly belong to her, and she had only so many knucklebones comfortingly clacking together in her pocket to work with.

Somehow, the staircases had been worse than the cramped hallways. Designed to be used only in emergencies, the lights wouldn’t turn on without an alarm being pulled. The necromantic light that she had summoned to her hand was weak and pitiful. Her father’s mouth would thin out in disapproval if he had seen this attempt. Her every step had released more dust into the air. Harrow had coughed her way up and down every flight, clinging to the guardrail, scared of putting one foot wrong and tumbling all the way down to the Locked Tomb. Her two skeleton constructs had obligingly clattered along after her, completely useless.

It hadn’t been that unbearable until Harrow had made a left turn—convinced that the lift up was right around the corner—and had come face to face with one of her own cramped X’s on a scapula.

At that, Harrow had sat down in the nearest recess at the foot of a necrosaint statue whose face had been rubbed off by time. She tried very hard not to cry. Harrow wasn’t a _baby_. She knew the name of every single bone in the human body and how they were connected without having to sing _the tibia’s connected to the fibula_ the way Griddle still did _and_ what kinds of necromantic theorems they were best suited to fueling. Her mum had pierced her ears with another set of bone chip studs only two weeks ago and her lip hadn’t even quivered. Every day, Harrow woke up with the knowledge of what she was and what her parents had done to guarantee that, and she got out of bed despite it. Being lost in the depths of her own home shouldn’t daunt her, but she was very daunted.

It was all so stupid and also all Griddle’s fault. If only Griddle had been capable of shutting up about her sword on her own, then Harrow wouldn’t have had to try to find a way to stop her. Ever since Aiglamene had bestowed Griddle with a sword of her very own and regular lessons on how not to disembowel herself, it had been the only thing she talked about. Harrow was sick of it. She’d known that Griddle had a simple mind, but she hadn’t realized quite how one track it was and how badly weapon training would jam it up.

It was at its pinnacle in nun lessons; their one remaining lesson together, now that Griddle had mastered the alphabet and could count without consulting her fingers. That wasn’t fair, but Harrow didn’t feel very fair at the moment. In class, Harrow would get in a lot of trouble if she grabbed the bone chips out of her newly pierced ears and threw them at Griddle and, therefore, had no real way to unsubscribe from Gideon Nav’s Sword Facts. Whenever Sister Morbilia would get distracted by her prayer beads and forget that she was supposed to be teaching them special occasion call and responses, which was often, Griddle would kick at Harrow’s chair and whisper hotly in Harrow’s ear about how cool her two-hander was and how she was going to whack all of the Emperor’s enemies right in the face with it. Normally Harrow would have tattled on her immediately, but lessons with Sister Morbilia were so boring. There was nothing Sister Morbilia could teach them: Harrow already knew it all, and Griddle would never learn.

Worse than that, Griddle had started avoiding her to practice her form with a repurposed broomstick and to determinedly shuffle around the planter fields. “I’ve got to get built,” Griddle would always say if asked, “just absolutely shredded, if I want to be the kind of person my two-hander deserves.”

Griddle also absolutely refused to answer any of Harrow’s follow up questions like, “Why?” or “Why do you care so much about an inanimate object?” or “Shredded? Where did you even learn to talk like that?”

From Griddle’s dumb ramblings, Harrow could picture her stupid sword exactly, even down to the way the grip felt in Griddle’s hands. She hadn’t seen it in person. Aiglamene wouldn’t let Griddle take it out of the practice room yet, because Griddle couldn’t be trusted. Not like Harrow. Harrow bet that if she weren’t a necromancer and had to resort to brute force to solve her problems, she’d be allowed out with her weapon on her belt after the very first lesson. But, of course, if she weren’t a necromancer, she wouldn’t exist.

And, if Griddle hadn’t existed and hadn’t been the way that she was, then Harrow wouldn’t have been compelled to sneak out after her and set bone wards in every deserted, dim corner at the heart of Drearburh if she wanted to find her. That had led Harrow to what she thought was a shortcut through the catacombs and then to a detour and then to her current predicament.

Harrow clenched her fist around the knucklebones in her pocket so hard that her own knucklebones protested. It didn’t help. If only she had thought before acting, if only she could think of a way out now, if only she wasn’t such a moron. But, instead, Harrow was the brightest hope of her whole generation, and she was going to be extinguished in the dark bowels of her own home.

A tear leaked out. Harrow wanted to rub at her eyes and force her tears back in, but then her face paint would smear. Late for dinner was one thing. Late for dinner without full face paint was another thing that she didn’t even want to think about. Another tear fell.

Harrow heard someone clear their throat in that particular way that meant they wanted to get your attention and had gotten thoroughly fed up waiting for you to notice on your own. Crux was really good at it.

She jerked her head up, thumping her head against the statue of the anonymous necrosaint, and was confronted with a very tall adult stranger. She was little more than an impression of height; her dark clothes blended too well into the all encompassing gloom. But, unfortunately, her face was fully illuminated by Harrow’s meager blue light flickering from the hands of her skeleton constructs. The stranger had painted the worst skull on her face that Harrow had ever seen. It was all smudged and lopsided; the part around her left eye was more of a suggestion of black than actually black, and she’d mixed some red paint in with the grey on her forehead to get pink. Even Griddle could paint a better skull.

“Hi,” the stranger said and waved slightly. Her voice sounded somehow familiar, but Harrow didn’t recognize anything else about her.

Immediately, Harrow stood up as gracefully as she could and beckoned her light back to her own hand. A stranger could only mean one thing: a new batch of nuns had arrived. A subpar batch from the Third House, judging by her lack of artistic ability and her red hair, respectively. Harrow didn’t know a lot about the Third House; their brand of necromancy was just so fleshy. All she really knew was that they were rich, had redheads, and that they absolutely hated if people ate with their elbows resting on the table. Her parents were always after her to eat with her spoon in her left hand so she wouldn’t bring shame down on the Ninth House if she ever got invited to break bread with the Third House. She’d better act accordingly.

The stranger took a step back, then leaned forward, squinting at Harrow. “Are you ok?” she asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

“Yes,” Harrow said, coldly.

“Are you sure?” the stranger pressed. “I thought you were just thinking about bones in the dark really hard, but you’ve been cry—“

“Who are you?” Harrow demanded. Her father excelled at looking down his nose when using this tone—Harrow always felt as small as an ear ossicle when he used it on her—and she tried to mimic him. It was hard when the stranger was so much taller than her. Harrow gave it her best shot anyways.

The stranger straightened up and moved back further. Her grey paint had taken on a sickly green cast in the glow. “You can call me Iphigenia.”

Harrow made a face despite herself. Most of the nuns had traditional Ninth names, either bestowed at birth or adopted along with their new home. But _Iphigenia_. That name sounded Sixth, like something scraped out of an old mouldering book.

The stranger—Iphigenia—put her hand over her heart. “You don’t like my name? I’m hurt, even though you’re an infant and can’t be expected to have any taste.”

Harrow went up on her tiptoes and leaned her back against the statue for more stability. Iphigenia watched her with an air of benign tolerance.

“I am Harrowhark Nonegsimus, Reverend Daughter of the Locked Tomb, Lady of Drearburh, heir to the Ninth House,” she said.

“I know,” said Iphigenia.

“Then you should know that you can’t talk to me like that,” she said. Because she had outgrown childish things, she didn’t stomp her foot on the ground, but it was a near thing.

“I know that. In theory,” Iphigenia said, receding further into the dark. “This has been great, but I’ve gotta bounce. There’s something I want to see while I’m here.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said, landing back down on her heels. A way out! A way out without having to admit what was wrong! With a thought, her constructs started out after Iphigenia.

Iphigenia stopped. The hair on the back of her head was going every which way, as if she’d never learned how to use a comb. “I’m not taking three lefts, then a right, then going up five flights of stairs behind the door decorated with jawbones, and taking another left to get to the lift up. But if I were, then you could tag along.”

Harrow’s constructs changed direction along with her. Maybe if she really hurried, she could minimize her parents’ reaction. Maybe, on the way back, she could come up with a better reason for being late than getting distracted by Griddle again.

Right as Harrow made the first left, Iphigenia called out, “I’m sorry for later.” Her voice was almost completely swallowed up by the sound of uncountable machines ticking along in the vast space at the core of the Ninth, the background hum of her home.

Harrow didn’t dwell on any of it, let alone her possibly misheard, cryptic last message. Iphigenia’s directions were good, she wasn’t terribly late, and her parents accepted, without any qualms, her excuse of getting too caught up in learning a new necromantic theorem. Even when Harrow didn’t recognize her among the new recruits, she didn’t worry about it. Harrow didn’t think she could identify Iphigenia with properly applied face paint.

Before too long, the whole encounter got pushed out of her mind by more important pursuits. Like mapping the depths of the Ninth so she could more effectively sneak up on Griddle, or trying to figure out what was the smallest amount of bone she needed to make a whole skeleton.

———

The third time Harrow saw the ghost, Harrow knew she was a ghost immediately. For one, Iphigenia’s breath didn’t form a cloud in front of her mouth from the cold. For another, nobody could live in the Ninth for more than a week, let alone years, without improving their skull painting skills. If Iphigenia had wandered into church looking like that, the nuns would descend on her and forcibly repaint her, or possibly sentence her to time in the Ninth’s small prison for crimes against good taste.

Harrow was momentarily taken aback at how much worse it was than she remembered. Her memory had smoothed out the brushstrokes and made it way more symmetrical. The light near the entrance to the Locked Tomb allowed her to see it in all its misshapen glory.

The bright illumination also clearly revealed the cause of the ghost’s death: a series of holes punched right through her abdomen. Looking at them made Harrow’s stomach turn, so she refocused back on the ghost’s face. The ghost watched her with wide eyes and said nothing.

Harrow very carefully closed her journal around her pen and set it aside. It was eerily quiet. The walls around the atrium were so thick that the buzz that permeated throughout the rest of the Ninth was silenced. There was only the soft sound of Harrow’s own breathing and the crinkle of flimsy furiously moving under the power of the mysterious air currents that surrounded the Locked Tomb.

“Are you dead?” Harrow asked, after it became clear that the ghost wasn’t going to start a conversation on her own.

“Oh my god, Harrow, you can’t just ask someone if they’re dead,” the ghost said, “but, yes.”

There was another long silence where the ghost stared at Harrow, unblinking, deep in the grips of some emotion that Harrow couldn’t decipher.

“Do you want some blood?” Harrow asked, to be polite.

“To do what with it, drink it? Gross, no thanks,” the ghost said, exhausting Harrow’s limited knowledge of spirits and how to deal with them.

She could tell that this ghost would be more properly classified as a revenant, but that was about it. Her parents had tutored her on the basics; she could coax back the ghost of someone newly dead and cage them temporarily, the way any necromancer worth their salt could, but little more. When Harrow’s grandmother had died, Harrow had sat at her deathbed and called her back with Harrow’s own blood, under the watchful gaze of her parents. Her House and her talents ran to bones. Harrow hadn’t seen the point of becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none and hadn’t bothered to learn more outside of her realm. 

The ghost had gone back to looking melancholic. In the better light, Harrow could also tell that her hair wasn’t just red, it was the exact same red as Griddle’s. Not only that, but her eyes were the same bright yellow color that Harrow had secretly envied for years, and her nose a perfect replica of Griddle’s. Not everything matched. Her cheeks were too thin and one of her upper canines was very slightly crooked. Nobody on the Ninth, with access to the best bone adepts anywhere, had anything other than perfectly straight teeth. But she couldn’t be Griddle. Griddle was ten. And, anyways, Griddle had been very much alive the last time Harrow had seen this ghost.

“Are you Gideon’s mum?” Harrow asked before she could think better of it. As soon as she asked it, she regretted it. There was no way that it could be true.

“Sure,” the ghost said. “Let’s go with that.”

That didn’t sound like a truthful answer to Harrow. “How do you know who Gideon is?” Harrow asked, shuffling back in the direction of the entrance and shaking her bone bracelets down onto her wrists for easier access. This wasn’t her first trip to study the Locked Tomb, and while she’d never encountered anything like this here before, it wouldn’t be shocking to discover that the area was profoundly haunted.

“I named her, didn’t I?” the ghost said. “She’s my daughter, of course I know who she is.”

“How do you know who I am? You died over a year before I was born,” Harrow pressed.

“There have already been more questions than I expected when I decided to roll with your suggestion.”

“You also made another mistake. There wasn’t a mark on her body when they recovered it,” Harrow said, looking back at the neat line of wounds stamped along the ghost’s body.

The ghost touched her fingers to the hole over her heart. Her hand came away clean. “You’ve got me there, kiddo.”

“I’m not a kid,” Harrow protested, both hands reassuringly full of bone. “I’m nine.”

“Hi, nine,” the ghost said. “I’m Gideon.” And then the ghost proceeded to crack up over her own joke. Her laugh was a mirror of actual Gideon’s own laugh, only deeper.

Harrow flicked her arm, and four skeleton hands came up to grasp at the ghost’s legs. If revenants were corporeal, then Harrow didn’t want to risk not trying it. At once, she cast a tight focus ward on herself as a stop gap, desperately wishing that she hadn’t rejected all books in the Ninth’s library about spirits as useless for her quest.

“I’m not lying,” the ghost said, sobering up and stepping through the mass of bones at her feet, as if they were nothing. “I’m not going to hurt you, either.”

“How?” Harrow asked, her curiosity getting the better of her again. “How are you a ghost?”

“I don’t know. Spooky shit is your department. Hitting things very hard with blades is mine,” the ghost replied. “All I know is that I grew up, got the hell off of this planet, died, and now I’m stuck back in hell, aka existing on this planet for all eternity.”

The chill surrounding the Locked Tomb had started to permeate through Harrow’s clothes right into her bones. What she was saying was impossible and horrible and Harrow did not want to believe it. She wanted to believe this was a trial of the Tomb: a ward designed to showcase a robber’s worst fear. But that didn’t make sense either. It didn’t fit with any of the Locked Tomb’s other defenses. It didn’t fit with anything Harrow knew about necromancy either.

“Time travel appears to be involved, which is total bullshit,” the ghost continued. “I never liked the comics with fantasy plots. Give me something realistic, or don’t give me anything at all. Actually no, I could usually trade those off for something better, so give them, if the other option is nothing.”

Time travel. Another impossibility to file next to Griddle dying.

“Don’t look so sad,” the ghost of Gideon said. “Your older self is probably dancing on my grave.”

“I would never do that,” Harrow protested, her knees weak. This Gideon was an adult, but barely. Harrow would be shocked if she was even twenty-five. Dead at such a young age felt profoundly unfair. But Harrow knew all about profound unfairness and that would never mean it wasn’t true.

“What am I saying?” Gideon said, grinning. “We’re from the Ninth. None of us know how to dance.”

“I wouldn’t,” Harrow said. “You have to know I wouldn’t.”

“I know,” Gideon said, her face sliding back into her earlier grave expression. “I don’t think I have much time left. You have to know how sorry I am. But don’t—”

Gideon disappeared all at once, like a candle being blown out. Harrow called for her for a long, long time. She used every tool at her disposal, only leaving once blood sweat dripped down her forehead and onto her journal, blotching the cover..

Immediately upon entering the chaotically organized Ninth library—late, way too late for dinner with her parents, though they had stopped expecting that from her over a year ago—Harrow began to make a guide to all of the necromantic tomes on topics that she’d previously sneered at. Maybe one of them would have a description of what she’d experienced.

Maybe one of them would have an answer to the problem of a ghost like looked like Griddle and talked like Griddle that didn’t mean Griddle was dead.

———

When Harrow looked up from laying out her notes next to the bodies of her parents, the living Gideon had been replaced with her dead doppelgänger. The ghost of Gideon didn’t say anything. A small relief; Harrow didn’t know if she could tolerate any more apologies from her.

Besides, there wasn’t space for Harrow to pick at the riddle of Gideon’s ghost. Her parents were dead, and she needed them to be alive. Or, at the very least, to have the semblance of being alive. There was no time for anything other than that. Still, Harrow’s temples throbbed with the effort not to cry, and her throat was choked up with agony. Later, she told herself. Later. She stared so fixedly at the flimsy that her vision blurred.

Somewhere in Harrow’s catalog of the library was the name of a book smuggled out of the Seventh House, at great risk, thousands of years ago. It had an extremely thorough description of the way of the beguiling corpse, though it did not spell out the actual necromantic theorems. Harrow had read it about six months previously, thought, oh, I could do that, and set it aside as irrelevant to her singular quest to get inside the Locked Tomb. 

She’d been right. It hadn’t been useful at all this morning when she’d finally, finally entered the tomb and seen the whole reason for her existence. The sum of a promise broken almost a full myriad ago and a war crime committed slightly over a decade ago had stood and looked at the corpse of a girl and had chosen to go back to her room.

Now, her mind was blank, bereft of any helpful details, like what were the reverse engineered theorems for mummification that she’d sussed out, or what was the name of the book, or even what sector of the library her paranoid great-great-great grandfather had concealed the tome in. All she could think of was a question.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Harrow asked around the lump of congealed grief in her throat.

Gideon didn’t answer. She was already gone.

———

Two months, a week, and four days after her parents died, Harrow systematically went through every single ritual she could unearth from the Ninth library to summon ghosts. Nobody came. Not her parents. Not Gideon.

———

But three weeks and three days later, Gideon was there. Harrow had just finished picking through a packet of porridge while pouring over the Ninth’s ledger, and there she was.

“Did it work?” the ghost of Gideon asked, frantic. “Did you do it?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Harrow asked in reply, her voice perfectly even with a tremendous effort. “Why didn’t you tell me that my parents would kill themselves?”

“What?” Gideon said, her eyes refocusing on Harrow’s face.

Harrow sat, enrobed in her very best church robe, her notes on how best to pinch pennies surrounding her, and did not yell. She had not said anything to the living Gideon in three months, in the space between her parents being alive and her parents being dead. Everything she wanted to say to both of them gathered on her tongue, and Harrow thought if she opened her mouth again, they’d all spew out at once.

Gideon glanced down at her chest, made a face, then returned to her study of Harrow. “Why are you a baby?” She was always so stuck on Harrow’s age.

“I’m ten,” Harrow said. Her voice cracked.

“Oh,” Gideon said. “Oh no. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Harrow repeated for the third time.

“I didn’t know,” Gideon said. “I wouldn’t have told your parents if I had known.”

“No,” Harrow demanded. She’d finally mastered her father’s most forbidding tone. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“I couldn’t have? I have to admit, I don’t really understand what’s happening. I was dead, I just died, it hurt a lot, and now I’m here.” Gideon spread her hands wide as if to plead for forgiveness and didn’t appear to notice when her shattered arm clipped through a bookcase.

“Back in hell, I know. I’ve seen you before,” Harrow said, narrowing her eyes when Gideon appeared ready to interrupt her. “I’ve seen you as a ghost before, you moron. Of course both of us know that we’re acquainted in my timeline. Several times when I was younger, I saw the impossibly dead version of you. Why didn’t you tell me _then_?”

Gideon went all hazy for a moment, like a dark veil had been placed between them. At that, Harrow could no longer fully control herself and screamed at the injustice of it all. It wasn’t fair, and it was all Gideon’s fault.

“Harrow, I promise. I swear to you on my mother’s bones, if I can, I’ll tell you everything.” 

And, in between Harrow closing and opening her eyes, she was gone again.

———

Halfway through Gideon chewing her out for Harrow’s latest interference in her attempts to run off to the Cohort and promptly get herself killed—trying to impersonate a prison officer to commandeer a shuttle was a new one; stupid, but very novel—Gideon’s ghost popped up over her younger self’s shoulder. Side by side, the scant differences between them were magnified, if Harrow ignored the variation in clothes and all of dead Gideon’s mortal wounds. The younger Gideon’s face was bare and flushed with rage. Her ghost had the same shockingly bad paint job as always. It was hard to say who had the worst hairstyle. Fifteen year old Gideon had grown out her bangs and then hacked at them so that the left half of her face was covered by her hair. She had adopted a particular head twitch to fling her bangs out of her luminescent eyes without having to tuck them behind her ears. It was so, so dumb. Older Gideon, age unknown, had hair that looked like she’d been dragged backwards through an oss. It probably wasn’t fair to judge her on that, given the apparently violent nature of her death. The ghost of Gideon grinned at her younger self, revealing her snaggle toothed canine.

But the biggest difference had to be their expression. Gideon the younger’s face was contorted in rage, and Gideon the older’s looked delighted to see Harrow in a way that Harrow had never experienced in her waking life.

Other than that, they were identical. They were the same unreasonably tall height, to Harrow’s extreme irritation, and Gideon the Younger’s shoulders had broadened and her biceps filled out to match her older incarnation. Looking at them both made Harrow feel sick.

“I don’t get why you don’t just let me leave,” the real Gideon yelled, at the crescendo of her rant. “You hate me, I hate you, and it’d be cheaper to let the Cohort handle me.”

“Griddle, Griddle, Griddle,” Harrow said, her gaze fixed on the very dead version. “I can’t let you leave _because_ I hate you.”

The living Gideon jerked her head, dramatically hurling her hair out of her eyes and stomped down the corridor, right through her ghostly double. She was so predictable. She always let Harrow get the last word in.

“Wow,” the dead Gideon said. “It’s so weird seeing me in a larval state. I hadn’t realized how bad that haircut was before. I looked like a total twit. I mean, I did eventually realize that look wasn’t going to attract babes, but did hormones make me go momentarily blind?”

“No, that was your hair,” Harrow retorted. “I tell you constantly how bad it is. I told you earlier in this very conversation.”

“Yeah, but I thought you were just jealous of how cool it made me look. I should really have been nicer to those terrible teens. I hadn’t realized how badly my own brain had rotted out under the onslaught of overactive glands.”

“Is that your excuse for breaking your promise to tell me about my parents?” Harrow asked, refocusing. “Your brain rotted out after death?”

Gideon’s face snapped back into seriousness. It didn’t suit her. “I tried. It didn’t work. Every time I got a sentence out about it, I got snapped back to the beginning of the conversation. I don’t... I don’t understand at all what’s happening or why I keep bouncing around your life, but apparently that’s a constant. You open up that tomb, your parents die, and I get the hell out of dodge and join them.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me who you are? I have more than two braincells left in my skull to rub together to figure this out. Instead, you just gave me a fake name ripped from one of your nasty serials and pretended to be your own mom.” Harrow said. She felt profoundly tired, wrung out from her earlier conversation with living Gideon and sensing the dead Gideon would be just as exhausting.

“I dunno. The mom thing seemed like the thing to do, I had been at that same conversation for what felt like days, and I didn’t know what to say in response. Denial eventually always led back to the start. And I haven’t used a fake name with you yet. But I knew you went through and read my porn mags. I knew it, you little creep,” Gideon said, fondly. “What name do I pick?”

“Iphigenia,” Harrow said, caught. From skimming those particular periodicals, she’d learned two things: that the name was from the Fourth House, not the Sixth like a much younger her had guessed, and that apparently cavaliers could have breasts the size of their own heads without it impacting their combat ability in any way.

“That’s a good one,” Gideon said. She fiddled with her rolled up sleeves. Harrow started, she hadn’t realized that Gideon the ghost could alter her own appearance. “Do you believe me?” Gideon asked, addressing her busted knee.

“Not yet,” Harrow said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“You don’t make any sense,” Gideon retorted, then scrunched up her face. “Oh shit, I think I have to go now. I’m starting to recognize how that feels.”

“No, don’t—” but it was too late again. Harrow wanted to grab Gideon back and shake answers from her by any means necessary. But she had no means to compel her and no references to consult, aside from Gideon’s lurid skin mags. Time travel was an impossibility, according to all necromantic and scientific laws, and, despite five encounters with her ghostly pest, Harrow was no closer to cracking the code.

———

In the myriadic year of the Necrolord Prime—ten thousand years of his rule and the glory of his renewal—a year that Harrow felt both tremendously lucky to be alive in and disgusted at herself for taking any joy in her existence in turns, Gideon’s ghost interrupted Harrow’s bedtime prayer. She waited patiently for Harrow to finish before asking, “How many times have you seen me before?”

“Five,” Harrow said at once.

Gideon nodded, her face drawn. “So you’ve seen me six times, if we count all that business with the unending conversation in front of the Tomb as just one time.”

“I only remember five,” Harrow insisted.

“One time you were a baby,” Gideon said. “An actual infant. I know I keep bringing up how young you look to me, but this was legit. You were in a crib and got so furious when your hands went right through my finger. I have never seen you that mad, and trust me, I know from Harrowhawk Nonagesimus rage.”

“And?” Harrow prompted.

“And it’s been six for me too,” Gideon said, and Harrow immediately got the importance. “I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m going to stick around for longer than normal this visit. I guess I’m starting to get the hang of this being dead business.”

Harrow flexed her fingers and considered what she wanted to ask her first. There were too many possibilities. She’d written a list down in a journal years and years ago and had filled several pages full of questions in her cramped handwriting. Harrow thought about retrieving it, but discarded it immediately. There was no guarantee that Gideon wouldn’t pull her disappearing act on her again. Instead, she tried to rank her questions from most to least important, cross-tabulated with how likely she thought Gideon would actually answer it, in her head.

“Why didn’t you ever tell a younger me about me?” Gideon interrupted her thoughts. “I know you didn’t succeed, because I don’t remember that, and if you had tried and failed, you would have experienced that whole horrible looping situation and wouldn’t have had to ask me about it.”

She considered the question and found that she couldn’t answer it adequately. Or, at least, she didn’t feel up to the task of attempting it while dressed in her nightclothes, barefaced. Instead, she deflected, ineptly. “My family has a ceremonial pool, filled with salt water, where we’d discuss those kinds of secrets. I don’t know if I can tell you anything outside of it, but I haven’t been in it since my parents died.”

“Tell me,” Gideon said at once. “Please.”

Harrow got up, and led Gideon in silence out into the hallway, past the dark and forbidding doors of her parents’ room, skirting their marital bed through long habit, to a cabinet filled with mouldering coats. Throughout the journey, Harrow kept glancing back at Gideon, sure that she’d disappear without a word of warning, but every time, she was still there, limping along. Harrow shouldered the coats aside, then reformed the thin bone backing of the dresser to reveal a door with a slight gesture and an even smaller expenditure of her will.

They went down the stone steps, unpleasantly cold against Harrow’s bare feet, and reached the small hidden chamber at its base. It looked exactly like she remembered. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling were all formed from the exact same large grey bricks that absorbed all light cast by her puny necromantic flame. There was no decoration, it was brutally utilitarian, with the stones for the floor left exactly rough enough to prevent slips and falls. Despite Harrow’s neglect, it was very clean and the water was full to the brim of the pool. Near the swimming clothes, there was a skeleton construct in the corner, responsible for maintenance. Harrow went to them to change and had to discard her old, childhood robe as too small.

“Don’t look,” she told Gideon, confident that Gideon wouldn’t even be tempted to peek, and shrugged into her mother’s old robe. It fit too well.

Gideon was still there, standing on the bottom step, her hands over her eyes, when Harrow was done. “Does your knee hurt?” Harrow asked, out of a combination of curiosity, manners, and an attempt to delay the inevitable.

“No,” Gideon said, revealing her stupidly painted face again. “The part before I died hurt like a motherfucker, but I can’t feel anything now.”

Harrow eased one of her legs into the water. It was exactly as horrible as she remembered. “You told me that dying itself hurt.”

“It didn’t. Right before, yes, but this,” Gideon waved a hand at her chest. “I didn’t feel that. And after—”

Harrow slid the rest of her body into the frigid water. The wet cloth of her robe clung uncomfortably to her body before floating away. Harrow sat in one of the small recesses carved into the sides of the pool, her sacrum scraping against the back. “Do you think you can join me?”

Gideon visibly considered it, before running at the pool and jumping in. It didn’t splash, there was no ripple around her body, no sign that she was there at all, but Gideon floated, suspended in the salt water anyways. She dunked her head under and then reemerged, her painted skeleton even more of a wreck than normal. Her hair was unevenly plastered to her head like a cap.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know you were you at first,” Harrow said, picking back up the thread of their conversation. “After the tomb, my calculations changed. At that point, I didn’t think you’d believe me. And then when my parents died…”

Gideon stared at her, her golden eyes glowing in the gloom, the brightest thing in the whole room. “I didn’t think you’d actually answer me. You basically never answer my questions.”

Harrow longed to fix Gideon’s hair, to rub the rest of her face paint clean off, to do something, anything to restore the ghost into reflecting the living girl more accurately. She dug her nails into her palms to distract herself.

“Do you regret dying?” Harrow asked into the hush.

“No,” Gideon said right away. “Never.”

Harrow considered, then asked the most important question. The one right at the top of her list. “How did you die?” 

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Gideon retorted, fingergunning.

“You moron, can you be serious for one moment?” Harrow said. She catalogued Gideon’s injuries—a bum knee, a deep sword gash in her arm, all of the round holes pressed into her chest—and tried to read the story of her death from them. All she could tell was that Gideon had run off and found herself in a load of trouble, probably from doing something very stupid and very brave.

“I’ll try. Have you gotten a letter from the Emperor yet?”

“Yes,” Harrow said, “today. He’s recruiting Lyctors.”

“Then tomorrow my younger self’s stolen shuttle is going to show up at the buttcrack of dawn and carry her off, if you don’t swoop in to be a buzzkill. Tell her that the shuttle staff contacted you for further instructions, if asked,” Gideon said. The lower part of her body—the part submerged in the salt water—had started to become translucent.

“Wait,” cried Harrow.

“I can’t,” Gideon said, merging into the darkness, her eyes dimming. “Sorry, not sorry about dying.”

Later, planting bones by hand under the hard floor of the landing field, the hair at the nap of her neck still damp from the pool, Harrow cursed her for being so dramatic.

———

When their shuttle broke through the thin atmosphere of the Ninth on their way to the First, Gideon turned around to grin her newly wolfish grin at the small window. Apparently in absolute hysteric raptures that she’d finally managed to escape her hell planet.

Her canine was crooked. Whatever bone adept had shoved back in the tooth that Harrow had knocked out during their last duel had done a sloppy job. There was now very little differentiating Gideon from the ghostly apparition that had haunted Harrow’s childhood. There was very little to separate her from her death. Harrow hated her for it.


End file.
